


Interlude

by rikacain



Category: Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-13 23:16:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4541178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rikacain/pseuds/rikacain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Lane is in the glass box, like a specimen on display, and as he raises his gun to shoot Ethan repeatedly (and futilely) between the eyes, Benji thinks to himself that something is different, that something has changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interlude

**Author's Note:**

> Interlude { _noun_ }  
> 1\. an intervening episode, period, space, etc.

They don’t talk about feelings.

It’s a touchy subject - IMF (or any intelligence agency, for that matter) doesn’t approve of relationships between agents. While they recognize that friendship is an enhancing factor in team performance, romantic relationships are harder to predict. Feelings obstruct performance, the kind of rational cool-headed decisions that agents should exhibit, when the life of someone else more important than the country is in the balance.

But that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. He’s seen Jane and Trevor, after they had accepted him as one of theirs and before Trevor had died. He’s also seen the burning fallout that was Jane after Trevor’s death.

He might be the least experienced in-field, but he understands what being a field agent entails as much as the next person does.

“Don’t think about it,” Jane tells him once. They had been drinking back on home soil after a mission, and he’s seen how she’s seen how he’s been glancing at Ethan every mission when he had thought no one was looking, the glances he’d been trying to convince himself that it was just an unhealthy amount of hero worship.

“You make it sound like I stand a chance,” he tries to joke.

Jane looks at him and he looks at the bags under her eyes, the pinched crease between her eyebrows. Even though it’s been months, even though on the last mission she had managed to kill a man using a steel pipe before he had the chance to use his gun, she still looks like she’s been running on pure adrenaline.

She looks tired.

“Just don’t, Benji,” she repeats. “It’s not worth it.”

“But you don’t regret it,” he says, his mouth running slightly loose after a good number of beers, things he’d never say spilling out into the dim pub light, shining and shimmering and less than splendid. These things, people don’t really want to hear.

“I do,” Jane says, trying to convince him or herself, he can’t tell. Maybe it’s both. “So don’t, Benji. Don’t.”

She looks at him, expecting him to understand, and the sad thing is he does. He knows - no, knew Trevor after all.

“I won’t,” he finally says, sober and solemn.

* * * * *

But he looks, after all that.

And what he notices is that sometimes, just sometimes, Ethan stares at him with his eyes this shade of darker, and then tears his gaze away as if he’s chastising himself. Sometimes Ethan claps him on the back and leaves his hand there a little longer than he should, after a particularly risky mission.

(There are a lot of risky missions.)

Sometimes Ethan presses against him when they’re trying to hide from the mark of the day’s hired goons, crowding him into a closet or storage room and they wait, with pounding hearts and bated breath until the last footsteps die away. Benji’s always hyper aware of how Ethan’s knee presses into the side of his thigh, how his breath warms the air on the side of his neck, and if Benji wanted to, how he could turn his head and raise his hand to pull the other man into a kiss.

(“Don’t, Benji,” Jane says, her eyes on the beer in her hand.)

They’re both field agents, and they’re both professionals. So whenever Ethan looks, Benji looks away.

* * * * *

It changes after Lane.

He had faith in Ethan to do the right thing, for the very reason they had been skirting the line between friends and lovers. If the right thing for the world was to prevent Lane from getting at the information on the drive, then Ethan would do it, methods be damned.

(If the right thing involved letting Benji… go, he wanted to believe that Ethan would do it, because it would mean that the world that Ethan Hunt lives in would benefit from one less threat.)

But Ethan, ever unpredictable and stubborn, manages to up the stakes by offering himself in Benji’s place.

_No_ , he wants to say when Ethan tells him go, but he knows that Ethan is not a martyr, and will not sacrifice himself. He clings to this knowledge as he meets up with Luther and Will in the tunnel, and he trusts in his team. He’s not sure he could have done anything else.

When Lane is in the glass box, like a specimen on display, and as he raises his gun to shoot Ethan repeatedly (and futilely) between the eyes, Benji thinks to himself that something is different, that something has changed.

* * * * *

IMF is reinstated with Hunley as its head, and all is well.

Ethan approaches him after they are done with their respective briefings. Benji thinks about turning away like how he always does, but things have changed and he’s in a whole different ball game. There are things Benji has done for Ethan and things Ethan has done for Benji and it wouldn’t be right to pretend that whatever is there between them isn’t there.

“Hey,” he says softly.

“How are you feeling?” Ethan asks, and Benji thinks that this is them, navigating plains they have yet to explore.

“Fine,” Benji says, then thinks for a moment about what he really wants to say. “You memorised the contents on the drive.”

“I did,” and there’s something in the lines of Ethan’s face, a flicker of uncertainty that tells him that they’re approaching new territory. “I couldn’t see any other way.”

“That was a rather drastic action,” Benji comments, as if he hadn’t been the cause of those actions. “You could have just told-”

“No,” Ethan interrupts. “No, we couldn’t. We all agreed, Benji - that course of action was something Will, Luther and I refused to take.”

“So you put yourself in danger instead,” Benji says.

“I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Ethan corrects. “He took you, Benji. I… I couldn’t protect you.”

“So you threw away almost everything to get me back,” Benji says. His heart is pounding in his chest, a constant  _thud-thud-thud_ , a constant reminder that he’s alive. He wants to reach out and feel where Ethan’s heart is, to make sure that he’s alive. “I just didn’t expect.”

“There was no other way,” Ethan repeats himself. “I couldn’t - I can’t let you go, Benji.”

Funny how what he was trying to prevent happened anyway, Benji thinks. He sees Jane and her bottle of beer, eyes wet and shining under the dim light of a world without Trevor.

He also sees Jane, so many months ago, laughing and in love with Trevor.

“So what now,” he asks, and they both know that he’s not talking about their next mission.

“You choose,” Ethan tells him.

New territory and if he has to travel through it, he might as well do it with someone. Benji leans forward, takes Ethan’s hand and waits.

“Let’s go home,” he says, and Ethan squeezes his hand back.

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted to tumblr [here](http://rikacain.tumblr.com/post/126244417198/maybe-mi5-prompt-for-benji-and-ethan-after-the).


End file.
